TRANSCRIPT 🔗
WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.080
Before we start, this episode discusses murder, bestiality, executions, slavery, suicide, and torture.
00:00:08.080 --> 00:00:10.400
Please take care of yourself while you listen.
00:00:10.400 --> 00:00:14.240
If you are struggling, you can call or text 988.
00:00:14.240 --> 00:00:17.280
We should be considerate to the living.
00:00:17.280 --> 00:00:20.239
To the dead, we owe only the truth.
00:00:20.239 --> 00:00:30.160
That's the French writer Voltaire in a letter published in 1719, meaning that we shouldn't be so harsh on the living because they can still suffer.
00:00:30.160 --> 00:00:35.600
But for the dead, we can just tell the plain truth without worrying about their feelings.
00:00:35.600 --> 00:00:39.039
Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with him.
00:00:39.039 --> 00:00:51.840
This week we're investigating who gets to tell a woman's story after she dies, why the stories outlive the truth, and why those stories so often turn her into a witch or a slut.
00:00:51.840 --> 00:00:54.479
This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts.
00:00:54.479 --> 00:00:57.039
I'm your host, Xtina Rose.
00:00:57.039 --> 00:01:13.599
Before we get started, I want to remind you that this is a system episode, and it's the starting point for our next three episodes on Catherine the Great, Marie Antoinette, and Dorothy Bradford.
00:01:13.599 --> 00:01:20.079
In a small ceme tery in Burrville, Rhode Island, strangers come looking for a grave.
00:01:20.079 --> 00:01:27.359
They've been coming for years because they've heard the woman buried there was a witch who killed a baby for the devil.
00:01:27.359 --> 00:01:32.560
Some of them damaged her headstone so badly that it had to be replaced.
00:01:32.560 --> 00:01:37.680
Her name was Bathsheba Sherman, and we covered her in our Halloween special.
00:01:37.680 --> 00:01:43.040
She was a farm wife who buried three of her four children before any of them turned four.
00:01:43.040 --> 00:01:50.719
She died in 1885, most likely of a stroke, and left her property to pay for her grandson's education.
00:01:50.719 --> 00:01:57.760
The witch story didn't appear until 1973, 88 years after her funeral.
00:01:57.760 --> 00:02:02.719
Forty years after that, a Hollywood movie called it a true story.
00:02:02.719 --> 00:02:07.920
A question I didn't get to in that episode is, is this legal?
00:02:07.920 --> 00:02:14.719
If someone published a book today saying your neighbor murdered a baby and it wasn't true, your neighbor could sue.
00:02:14.719 --> 00:02:19.439
That's defamation, a false statement of fact that damages someone's reputation.
00:02:19.439 --> 00:02:21.360
When it's written, it's libel.
00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:23.439
When it's spoken, it's slander.
00:02:23.439 --> 00:02:27.439
But in the United States, you can't defame the dead.
00:02:27.439 --> 00:02:35.520
Once a person dies, the law says their reputation died with them, and their family can't sue on their behalf.
00:02:35.520 --> 00:02:40.000
That rule holds even for the most famous lawyer in the country.
00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:44.240
In 2005, Johnny Cochran, the defense attorney from the O.J.
00:02:44.240 --> 00:02:46.960
Simpson trial, had a case before the U.S.
00:02:46.960 --> 00:02:52.960
Supreme Court against a man who'd been picketing his office with false and insulting signs.
00:02:52.960 --> 00:02:57.039
Cochrane died while the case was still waiting for a decision.
00:02:57.039 --> 00:03:05.280
His own lawyers then told the court that California doesn't recognize any claim for harm to a dead person's reputation.
00:03:05.280 --> 00:03:12.400
The man who won some of the biggest cases of his era couldn't protect his own name once he was gone.
00:03:12.400 --> 00:03:20.879
There is exactly one exception in the entire country, and it's in Rhode Island, Bathsheba's state.
00:03:20.879 --> 00:03:27.599
In 1974, Rhode Island passed a law that lets a dead person's estate sue for libel.
00:03:27.599 --> 00:03:31.599
When I found it, I thought Bathsheba might have a case after all.
00:03:31.599 --> 00:03:34.240
Then I read what it actually covers.
00:03:34.240 --> 00:03:45.919
It applies only to a false obituary or similar report in a newspaper, on the radio, or on TV published within three months of the death.
00:03:45.919 --> 00:03:53.599
Bathsheba's three months ran out in the summer of 1885, and the obituary she actually got was respectful.
00:03:53.599 --> 00:03:58.080
So 88 years later, her reputation was apparently fair game.
00:03:58.080 --> 00:04:02.719
Even in America, the law does protect one thing about a dead woman.
00:04:02.719 --> 00:04:13.439
In California, a famous person's estate controls her name, her face, and her voice on products and in ads for 70 years after she dies.
00:04:13.439 --> 00:04:21.120
Nobody can sell a t-shirt with her face on it without paying, but they can say almost anything they want about her.
00:04:21.120 --> 00:04:27.600
The law will guard a dead woman's face when there's money in it and do nothing for her name.
00:04:27.600 --> 00:04:30.879
But not every country made the same choice.
00:04:30.879 --> 00:04:38.480
In Germany, disparaging the memory of a dead person is a crime, and it can carry up to two years in prison.
00:04:38.480 --> 00:04:41.519
But America's rule does make some sense.
00:04:41.519 --> 00:04:54.240
If the dead could sue, a dictator's grandchildren could sue every historian who documented his massacres, and a dead businessman's estate could sue the reporter who exposed what he'd done.
00:04:54.240 --> 00:05:00.800
The same rule that lets someone lie about Bathsheba lets someone tell the truth about a monster.
00:05:00.800 --> 00:05:03.040
So it's not going away.
00:05:03.040 --> 00:05:09.519
But it means that once a woman dies, the only fact checker she has left is whoever's listening.
00:05:09.519 --> 00:05:12.800
And whoever outlives her owns the story.
00:05:12.800 --> 00:05:18.959
Sometimes that's a family
Load full transcript
with a ghost story, and sometimes it's a king with a chisel.
00:05:18.959 --> 00:05:30.720
In 1927, a team from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art dug near a great temple in southern Egypt and found a pit full of broken statues.
00:05:30.720 --> 00:05:39.360
There were stone faces, arms, hands, and bodies smashed and thrown away more than 3,000 years earlier.
00:05:39.360 --> 00:05:42.480
Every piece showed the same ruler.
00:05:42.480 --> 00:05:47.519
That ruler was Hatshepsut, and she was a king of Egypt.
00:05:47.519 --> 00:05:55.120
She'd been married to a pharaoh who died young and left the throne to a little boy, his son by another wife.
00:05:55.120 --> 00:06:01.519
The boy was Thutmosa III, and Hatshepsut ruled for him as regent.
00:06:01.519 --> 00:06:10.639
A few years in, she took the title of pharaoh for herself and ruled for about 20 years with the boy king as her junior partner.
00:06:10.639 --> 00:06:20.959
She restored temples that had fallen apart, reopened trade with distant lands, and built the temple those excavators were digging beside.
00:06:20.959 --> 00:06:26.240
And after she died, Thutmosa finally ruled alone.
00:06:26.240 --> 00:06:30.160
And at some point, someone set out to remove her.
00:06:30.160 --> 00:06:38.319
They cut her name out of temple walls and replaced it with the names of male kings, and they smashed and dumped her statues.
00:06:38.319 --> 00:06:44.879
The evidence suggests it happened late in Thutmosu's long reign, not right after her death.
00:06:44.879 --> 00:06:47.759
Why it happened is still a mystery.
00:06:47.759 --> 00:06:58.560
It may have been about succession, making the royal line look like an unbroken chain of men, so nobody could question Thutmosa's son's right to the throne.
00:06:58.560 --> 00:07:04.480
Some think it was Thumotsa's son who ordered it, but unfortunately nobody knows.
00:07:04.480 --> 00:07:10.160
The curators who dug up her temple in the 1920s had no doubts though.
00:07:10.160 --> 00:07:17.519
To them, the broken statues proved she'd stolen the throne and that the king was simply setting the record straight.
00:07:17.519 --> 00:07:26.560
In 1953, one of them described her as a quote, vain, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman.
00:07:26.560 --> 00:07:30.720
The damage done to her memory became the evidence against her.
00:07:30.720 --> 00:07:41.199
More than 3,000 years after her death, scholars reading the broken pieces of her statues gave Hatshepsut a brand new label, usurper.
00:07:41.199 --> 00:07:47.600
The wicked stepmother who stole a little boy's throne and deserved to be wiped off the walls for it.
00:07:47.600 --> 00:07:55.360
And while in Egypt the erasure happened in stone, in Rome it happened by order of the Senate.
00:07:55.360 --> 00:08:04.560
In the year 48, while the Roman Emperor Claudius was away at the port of Ostia, his wife held a wedding in Rome.
00:08:04.560 --> 00:08:14.959
The groom was a senator named Gaius Cilius, who'd already been chosen as one of the next year's consuls, the highest elective officials in the city.
00:08:14.959 --> 00:08:23.439
The bride was the empress herself, Valeria Messalina, who was still married to the emperor.
00:08:23.439 --> 00:08:28.879
Scandalous! Welcome to an episode of The Real Housewives of Ancient Rome.
00:08:28.879 --> 00:08:33.679
The Emperor's advisors convinced him it was a plot to overthrow him.
00:08:33.679 --> 00:08:38.080
Cilius was executed, and Messalina was killed.
00:08:38.080 --> 00:08:44.639
Afterward, the Senate ordered her name and her statues removed from every public and private place.
00:08:44.639 --> 00:08:55.600
And I am so glad we live in a time where we just have to delete photos on our social media and our phones instead of having to send people out to find all the statues and smash them.
00:08:55.600 --> 00:08:58.000
But here's the mystery.
00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:01.440
Why did she even go through with that wedding?
00:09:01.440 --> 00:09:06.320
Especially since her husband was alive and just a day's trip away.
00:09:06.320 --> 00:09:17.440
One ancient account says Cilius offered to adopt her young son Britannicus, the emperor's heir, with Messalina betting on a new husband to protect her son's future.
00:09:17.440 --> 00:09:25.759
Some historians think Cilius convinced her that the emperor was going down anyway, and that this was her only way to survive.
00:09:25.759 --> 00:09:29.919
And one modern theory says it was never a real wedding at all.
00:09:29.919 --> 00:09:34.879
Just a staged mock marriage at a harvest festival that got out of hand.
00:09:34.879 --> 00:09:39.200
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what she was thinking.
00:09:39.200 --> 00:09:44.720
What we do know is that once they erased her name, anyone could fill in the rest.
00:09:44.720 --> 00:09:51.120
About 30 years after her death, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder told a story about her.
00:09:51.120 --> 00:10:02.320
He claimed she challenged one of the most famous prostitutes in Rome to a contest over who could sleep with more men in a single day and night, and that she won.
00:10:02.320 --> 00:10:08.720
He put the story in a section of his encyclopedia about the mating habits of animals.
00:10:08.720 --> 00:10:19.120
Later, the poet Juvenal wrote that she slipped out of the palace at night in a blonde wig to work in a brothel under the name She-Wolf.
00:10:19.120 --> 00:10:28.320
The historians who wrote most about her did so generations later, under a new imperial family with every reason to make her look bad.
00:10:28.320 --> 00:10:34.080
So Messalina almost certainly had affairs, as many powerful Romans did.
00:10:34.080 --> 00:10:36.000
Have you seen Spartacus?
00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:41.519
And some ancient writers say she had rivals killed, which may also be true.
00:10:41.519 --> 00:10:51.120
But the contest and the brothel come from men who weren't there, writing decades later about a woman whose name had been officially wiped away.
00:10:51.120 --> 00:11:00.320
In Rome, accusing a political woman of sexual misconduct was one of the easiest ways to destroy her, whether it was true or not.
00:11:00.320 --> 00:11:03.759
So basically, things haven't changed much since ancient Rome.
00:11:03.759 --> 00:11:11.600
Five hundred years later, it happened to another empress, and this time the smear stayed hidden for a thousand years.
00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:18.879
Theodora ruled the Byzantine Empire alongside her husband, Emperor Justinian, in the 500s.
00:11:18.879 --> 00:11:25.279
The court historian Procopius recorded her bravest moment in his official history.
00:11:25.279 --> 00:11:31.519
A riot nearly toppled the throne, and her speech talked her husband out of running.
00:11:31.519 --> 00:11:36.960
In private, the same man was writing a very different book.
00:11:36.960 --> 00:11:44.720
It described Theodora as a woman with an endless filthy sexual appetite, and he never published it.
00:11:44.720 --> 00:11:48.000
But that sounds like fanfiction to me.
00:11:48.000 --> 00:11:50.879
For centuries, almost nobody read it.
00:11:50.879 --> 00:12:02.399
Then a copy turned up in the Vatican Library, and in 1623, more than a thousand years after it was written, it was actually printed.
00:12:02.399 --> 00:12:05.840
And it caused a sensation across Europe.
00:12:05.840 --> 00:12:12.320
And for many readers ever since, that secret book has been the only Theodora they know.
00:12:12.320 --> 00:12:27.200
Can you imagine if a man wrote down some sexual fantasy about like the late Queen Elizabeth, and then a thousand years later, someone finds it and publishes it as nonfiction?
00:12:27.200 --> 00:12:34.000
But sometimes the person holding the pen is someone who is just trying to honor her.
00:12:34.000 --> 00:12:42.720
In September of 1797, a woman lay dying in London 11 days after giving birth to her daughter.
00:12:42.720 --> 00:12:45.600
Her husband stayed by her side.
00:12:45.600 --> 00:12:53.200
The story goes that her last words about him were that he was the kindest, best man in the world.
00:12:53.200 --> 00:12:56.399
She was Mary Wollstonecraft.
00:12:56.399 --> 00:13:07.519
Five years earlier, she'd written A Vindication of the Rights of Women, one of the founding books of feminism, arguing that women weren't born with weaker minds.
00:13:07.519 --> 00:13:10.080
They were just denied an education.
00:13:10.080 --> 00:13:16.159
The baby girl she left behind grew up to write Frankenstein.
00:13:16.159 --> 00:13:20.799
Her husband, the philosopher William Godwin, was devastated.
00:13:20.799 --> 00:13:25.039
And within a few months, he published a memoir of her life.
00:13:25.039 --> 00:13:27.440
He decided to tell the whole truth.
00:13:27.440 --> 00:13:36.960
He wrote about her love affairs, about the daughter she'd had before they married, and about her two suicide attempts after that daughter's father left her.
00:13:36.960 --> 00:13:41.200
Godwin believed that honesty would honor her.
00:13:41.200 --> 00:13:43.679
Instead, it ruined her.
00:13:43.679 --> 00:13:51.840
Readers were scandalized, and her critics went back to the book looking for proof that a woman like that couldn't be trusted.
00:13:51.840 --> 00:14:01.039
Even the poet Robert Southey, who'd been a friend, accused Godwin of, quote, stripping his dead wife naked, end quote.
00:14:01.039 --> 00:14:03.759
And he meant figuratively, not literally.
00:14:03.759 --> 00:14:12.240
In Britain, for most of the next century, people remembered Wollstonecraft less as a thinker than as a fallen woman.
00:14:12.240 --> 00:14:15.279
And sometimes the motive is money.
00:14:15.279 --> 00:14:23.360
On a January morning in 1947, the body of a young woman was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles.
00:14:23.360 --> 00:14:26.240
Her name was Elizabeth Short.
00:14:26.240 --> 00:14:30.799
She was 22 and her murder has never been solved.
00:14:30.799 --> 00:14:38.639
Within days, the papers had a name for her, The Black Dahlia, a play on a hit movie that year called The Blue Dahlia.
00:14:38.639 --> 00:14:41.840
And then they started filling in the rest of her.
00:14:41.840 --> 00:14:44.240
First, she was a war widow.
00:14:44.240 --> 00:14:45.200
She wasn't.
00:14:45.200 --> 00:14:48.159
She never married the pilot she was engaged to.
00:14:48.159 --> 00:14:54.080
Then she was an aspiring actress, a beautiful girl who'd come to Hollywood to be a star.
00:14:54.080 --> 00:14:56.320
That's the version I heard.
00:14:56.320 --> 00:14:58.639
Then she was a party girl.
00:14:58.639 --> 00:15:04.960
And finally, in a best-selling crime novel in the late 1970s, A Prostitute.
00:15:04.960 --> 00:15:10.879
But in reality, she'd come to Southern California chasing a man and the romance fizzled.
00:15:10.879 --> 00:15:18.480
She told people she wanted to act, but there's no sign she ever took an acting class or even tried for a single role.
00:15:18.480 --> 00:15:22.159
She never even held a steady job in Los Angeles.
00:15:22.159 --> 00:15:30.159
By the end, she was moving from couch to couch and sometimes telling men sad stories to get money for rent.
00:15:30.159 --> 00:15:36.960
The grand jury that investigated her case said plainly that she was not a prostitute.
00:15:36.960 --> 00:15:39.360
But look at how the labels traveled.
00:15:39.360 --> 00:15:45.279
A broke young woman with nowhere to live became a starlet, because that's a better story.
00:15:45.279 --> 00:15:52.639
And a starlet who ends up dead in Hollywood became a woman who must have been asking for it.
00:15:52.639 --> 00:15:56.000
Sometimes the story is about the death itself.
00:15:56.000 --> 00:16:02.799
Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great, ruled the Russian Empire for more than 30 years.
00:16:02.799 --> 00:16:10.159
Almost everyone has heard how she supposedly died with a horse, a harness, and a rope that broke.
00:16:10.159 --> 00:16:13.919
I will let your imagination fill in the rest of that story.
00:16:13.919 --> 00:16:17.919
But in reality, she died of a stroke in 1796.
00:16:17.919 --> 00:16:25.200
The horse story takes the most powerful woman in Europe and turns her death into a dirty joke.
00:16:25.200 --> 00:16:31.120
And we'll explore where it all came from and the rest of her story in next week's biography episode.
00:16:31.120 --> 00:16:49.840
At Shepsuit, Messalina, Theodora, Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Short, and Catherine were erased by a successor, slandered by enemies, exposed by a grieving husband, sold by storytellers, and mocked by strangers.
00:16:49.840 --> 00:16:54.399
And in every one of their cases, the truth was still out there.
00:16:54.399 --> 00:16:57.759
Hatshepsit's temple is still standing.
00:16:57.759 --> 00:17:01.759
Catherine's death was documented by the people in the room.
00:17:01.759 --> 00:17:04.720
So why doesn't the truth win?
00:17:04.720 --> 00:17:08.000
And we'll get to that after this break.
00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:12.240
Let them eat cake.
00:17:12.240 --> 00:17:14.160
You know exactly who said it.
00:17:14.160 --> 00:17:18.720
The French queen with the towering hair right before the revolution cut off her head.
00:17:18.720 --> 00:17:22.880
But Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said it.
00:17:22.880 --> 00:17:27.839
The line was written about someone else while she was still a little girl.
00:17:27.839 --> 00:17:33.680
And it wasn't pinned on her in print until half a century after she was executed.
00:17:33.680 --> 00:17:37.519
And we'll dig into her whole story in two weeks.
00:17:37.519 --> 00:17:52.000
But for today, here's the question: How does a line about somebody else end up stuck to one particular woman so firmly that 200 years later, it's the first thing most people know about her?
00:17:52.000 --> 00:17:57.519
Two Harvard psychologists spent the 1940s trying to figure out exactly that.
00:17:57.519 --> 00:18:01.839
How a story changes as it gets passed from person to person.
00:18:01.839 --> 00:18:06.720
So they turned the childhood game of telephone into an experiment.
00:18:06.720 --> 00:18:12.880
One person looked at a detailed picture and described it from memory to someone who hadn't seen it.
00:18:12.880 --> 00:18:20.079
That person described it to the next, and so on down the line, while the researchers recorded every version.
00:18:20.079 --> 00:18:24.079
They expected the details to fade, and they did.
00:18:24.079 --> 00:18:35.759
Most of them were gone within the first handful of retellings, but the bigger finding was the way the story bent toward what people already expected to see.
00:18:35.759 --> 00:18:48.960
For example, in one picture, an ambulance was carrying boxes marked as explosives, and people kept retelling it as carrying medical supplies, because that's what ambulances usually carry.
00:18:48.960 --> 00:18:55.920
In another, set on a subway, a white man was holding a razor during an argument with a black man.
00:18:55.920 --> 00:19:00.960
A few people down the line, the black man was the one holding the razor.
00:19:00.960 --> 00:19:03.599
Nobody in that line was lying.
00:19:03.599 --> 00:19:07.839
Each person passed along the version that made sense to them.
00:19:07.839 --> 00:19:12.799
And what made sense was whatever matched what they already believed.
00:19:12.799 --> 00:19:22.559
That's how a line written about someone else ended up on the queen who fit everyone's picture of a spoiled foreigner who didn't care about the poor.
00:19:22.559 --> 00:19:27.759
And it happens every time a story gets passed along without its source.
00:19:27.759 --> 00:19:35.680
It loses the detail that would let someone check it, and it bends toward whatever the people repeating it already think.
00:19:35.680 --> 00:19:39.839
And the same thing happened to a woman you met in our Salem series.
00:19:39.839 --> 00:19:45.920
In the court papers of 1692, Tichubba is described as an Indian woman.
00:19:45.920 --> 00:19:57.279
The only magic anyone documented in that household was an English folk remedy, a witch cake, made of rye meal, mixed with the afflicted girl's urine and fed to a dog.
00:19:57.279 --> 00:19:59.279
And it was a neighbor's idea.
00:19:59.279 --> 00:20:04.319
But Tichubba later said her master beat her until she confessed.
00:20:04.319 --> 00:20:12.240
Then, over the next two and a half centuries, writer after writer retold her story without going back to the court papers.
00:20:12.240 --> 00:20:16.799
Each one copied the one before and then added something of their own.
00:20:16.799 --> 00:20:21.440
A historian gave her fortune-telling lessons that she was teaching the girls.
00:20:21.440 --> 00:20:25.119
A poet gave her an African father who practiced magic.
00:20:25.119 --> 00:20:34.640
By the time Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the 1950s, she was an enslaved black woman conjuring spirits with the girls in the woods.
00:20:34.640 --> 00:20:43.759
And psychologists have known since the 1970s that hearing a statement again makes it feel more true, whether it is or not.
00:20:43.759 --> 00:20:48.559
For a long time they assumed that it only worked on people who didn't know the facts.
00:20:48.559 --> 00:20:54.480
And in 2015, a team at Vanderbilt University decided to test that.
00:20:54.480 --> 00:21:02.720
First, people read a long list of statements, some true and some false, and rated each one for how interesting it was.
00:21:02.720 --> 00:21:04.319
And that was the whole task.
00:21:04.319 --> 00:21:07.200
Nobody was asked whether anything was true.
00:21:07.200 --> 00:21:16.079
Some of the statements were about things almost everyone knows, like which ocean is the biggest, and others were about things almost nobody knows.
00:21:16.079 --> 00:21:19.680
So in that first round, all they did was pick what was interesting.
00:21:19.680 --> 00:21:24.319
They didn't have to rate it, they didn't have to say whether it's true or false, just whether it was interesting.
00:21:24.319 -->
00:21:27.599
Then in the second round, people got a new list.
00:21:27.599 --> 00:21:38.160
And this time they were asked to rate each statement on how true it seemed, like on a scale from definitely false to definitely true.
00:21:38.160 --> 00:21:41.680
Half the statements were ones they'd read in the first step.
00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:44.000
The other half were new to them.
00:21:44.000 --> 00:21:54.640
And then finally, in the last step, they were given a multiple choice quiz on the same facts, with questions like What's the largest ocean?
00:21:54.640 --> 00:21:59.279
And that's how the researchers found out what each person actually knew.
00:21:59.279 --> 00:22:03.759
So, if knowing a fact protects you, the results should be simple.
00:22:03.759 --> 00:22:11.039
For any fact a person got right on the final quiz, it shouldn't matter if they saw the false version earlier.
00:22:11.039 --> 00:22:12.960
But that's not what happened.
00:22:12.960 --> 00:22:16.720
Even with the facts, people answered correctly on the quiz.
00:22:16.720 --> 00:22:27.759
The false statements about those facts still got higher truth ratings in the second round when the people had already read those false statements in the first round.
00:22:27.759 --> 00:22:38.000
People didn't suddenly believe the Atlantic was the biggest ocean, but that sentence seemed a little less false just because they'd seen it before.
00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:43.759
So, in other words, they didn't rank that Atlantic was the biggest ocean as completely true.
00:22:43.759 --> 00:22:50.480
They just didn't rank it as false, even though they knew that that was not the right answer.
00:22:50.480 --> 00:22:55.359
So, how can someone know the right answer and still be nudged by the wrong one?
00:22:55.359 --> 00:22:58.079
It comes down to the question being asked.
00:22:58.079 --> 00:23:03.200
Makes you look up the answer in your memory.
00:23:03.200 --> 00:23:06.240
How true does this sentence seem?
00:23:06.240 --> 00:23:07.440
Doesn't always.
00:23:07.440 --> 00:23:14.079
Sometimes your mind just notices that the sentence sounds familiar and familiar seems true.
00:23:14.079 --> 00:23:17.519
The researchers called this knowledge neglect.
00:23:17.519 --> 00:23:25.200
The right answer was in a person's memory, but they didn't use it when they judged the statement they had already heard.
00:23:25.200 --> 00:23:34.160
So the right answer could be in someone's memory, but they don't necessarily look for it when they're judging a false statement that they already heard before.
00:23:34.160 --> 00:23:35.839
But it wasn't all bad news.
00:23:35.839 --> 00:23:41.440
The strongest factor in what people believed was still whether the statement was actually true.
00:23:41.440 --> 00:23:47.759
Repetition made lies more believable, but it didn't make people believe everything.
00:23:47.759 --> 00:23:52.640
And every writer who retold Tichiba's story repeated the one before.
00:23:52.640 --> 00:23:57.519
And each repetition made the invented version feel a little more like history.
00:23:57.519 --> 00:24:03.599
And that's very similar to what happened to Tichiba, because most people don't know anything about Tichiba.
00:24:03.599 --> 00:24:13.359
So every writer who retold Tichiba's story repeated the one from before, and each repetition made the invented version feel more like historic fact.
00:24:13.359 --> 00:24:18.720
Nobody went back to the court papers because the story already felt known.
00:24:18.720 --> 00:24:24.640
But sometimes somebody does go back to the records and makes a correction, but it's still not enough.
00:24:24.640 --> 00:24:33.759
In 1994, two psychologists at the University of Michigan had people read a series of news updates about a warehouse fire.
00:24:33.759 --> 00:24:42.240
An early update said the fire probably started in a closet where someone had stored paint cans and gas cylinders.
00:24:42.240 --> 00:24:47.440
A later update corrected that because the closet had actually been empty.
00:24:47.440 --> 00:24:54.799
Then everyone answered questions about the fire, like why the smoke was so thick and why it spread so fast.
00:24:54.799 --> 00:25:05.680
If corrections worked the way we'd like them to, the people who got the correction should have reasoned just like people who never heard about the paint cans.
00:25:05.680 --> 00:25:06.640
They didn't.
00:25:06.640 --> 00:25:11.359
They kept blaming the paint cans for the thick smoke and the fast spread.
00:25:11.359 --> 00:25:17.039
Only when they were asked directly did many of them remember the correction.
00:25:17.039 --> 00:25:22.559
They knew the closet was empty, but they used the paint cans anyway.
00:25:22.559 --> 00:25:29.680
A correction leaves a gap, and people would rather keep a wrong explanation than have nothing at all.
00:25:29.680 --> 00:25:32.640
But the same research found something that works.
00:25:32.640 --> 00:25:44.160
When people were told the closet was empty and were also given a different cause, like signs of arson somewhere else in the building, they let go of the paint cans much more easily.
00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:46.960
So a correction on its own leaves a hole.
00:25:46.960 --> 00:25:50.720
A correction with a better explanation fills it.
00:25:50.720 --> 00:25:54.160
And that's what eventually happened for Hatshepsut.
00:25:54.160 --> 00:26:12.240
After those curators branded her vain and grasping, later scholars went back to her temples and records and told the fuller story, a reign of stability and prosperity, with restored monuments, reopened trade, and one of the most ambitious temples in Egypt.
00:26:12.240 --> 00:26:19.599
In 2005, the Met itself helped put together a major exhibition built around that version of her.
00:26:19.599 --> 00:26:23.599
The myth didn't just get corrected, it got replaced.
00:26:23.599 --> 00:26:30.480
And that worked because when I heard about Het Shepsu, I heard of her as one of the best rulers of Egypt.
00:26:30.480 --> 00:26:33.440
Bathsheba hasn't been so lucky.
00:26:33.440 --> 00:26:43.519
In 2014, the author whose family had lived in that farmhouse admitted in her third book that no records supported the rumors about Bathsheba.
00:26:43.519 --> 00:26:45.519
That was an actual correction.
00:26:45.519 --> 00:26:54.000
But it came out a year after a Hollywood movie told millions the opposite, and it didn't give them anything to replace the witch with.
00:26:54.000 --> 00:26:57.359
The author just moved on to blaming a different spirit.
00:26:57.359 --> 00:27:01.359
For almost everyone else, Bathsheba stayed the witch.
00:27:01.359 --> 00:27:06.640
People kept coming to her grave and kept damaging it until her headstone had to be replaced.
00:27:06.640 --> 00:27:15.119
The better explanation was there all along: the three small graves and the will that paid for her grandson's education.
00:27:15.119 --> 00:27:24.000
A drowned pilgrim wife got her own version of this, a suicide story that kept getting repeated even after it was debunked.
00:27:24.000 --> 00:27:30.160
Her name was Dorothy Bradford, and she's getting her own episode on our Thanksgiving special.
00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:37.359
So the lesson here is that when someone tells you a myth about a woman, saying, that's not true is not enough.
00:27:37.359 --> 00:27:42.880
You have to tell them what actually happened so they have something to replace the myth.
00:27:42.880 --> 00:27:46.400
And that's why a myth about anyone can stick.
00:27:46.400 --> 00:27:53.519
But it doesn't explain why the myths about dead women keep coming back in the same few shapes.
00:27:53.519 --> 00:27:56.400
And we'll get to that after this break.
00:27:56.400 --> 00:28:07.119
In 2010, two researchers at Yale wanted to see whether ambition gets punished differently for women and men.
00:28:07.119 --> 00:28:14.960
People read short biographies of fictional state senators, a man and a woman with basically the same background.
00:28:14.960 --> 00:28:20.079
In some versions, the senator came across as especially hungry for power.
00:28:20.079 --> 00:28:26.240
And then people were asked who'd they'd vote for and how they felt about each one.
00:28:26.240 --> 00:28:33.680
If voters simply dislike power-hungry politicians, ambition should have hurt the man and the woman equally.
00:28:33.680 --> 00:28:34.559
It didn't.
00:28:34.559 --> 00:28:39.359
When the woman seemed power seeking, people were less likely to vote for her.
00:28:39.359 --> 00:28:43.599
When the man seemed power seeking, it made no difference.
00:28:43.599 --> 00:28:45.599
And it didn't stop there.
00:28:45.599 --> 00:28:56.240
People reported moral outrage toward the ambitious woman, meaning contempt, anger, and disgust, and they saw her as less caring.
00:28:56.240 --> 00:28:59.839
Women judged her just as harshly as men did.
00:28:59.839 --> 00:29:03.759
She wasn't being punished for breaking a rule about politicians.
00:29:03.759 --> 00:29:08.000
She was being punished for breaking a rule about women.
00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:13.680
That disgust is what turns a political woman into a sexual monster.
00:29:13.680 --> 00:29:18.799
When a woman reaches for power, the reaction isn't, I disagree with her.
00:29:18.799 --> 00:29:21.200
It's something is wrong with her.
00:29:21.200 --> 00:29:23.839
Something unnatural and dirty.
00:29:23.839 --> 00:29:30.799
Messalina married a senator to protect her son, and she became a woman who sold herself in a brothel.
00:29:30.799 --> 00:29:36.480
Theodora helped run an empire, and she became a woman of endless appetite.
00:29:36.480 --> 00:29:43.119
Catherine ruled Russia for more than 30 years, and she became a joke about a horse.
00:29:43.119 --> 00:29:50.480
Even Hatchepsut's label, vain and ambitious, was a word for a woman who wanted too much.
00:29:50.480 --> 00:29:56.799
And if you've been with us since our very first episode, you know the research behind the other half of this.
00:29:56.799 --> 00:30:02.559
The ambivalent sexism theory states that sexism comes in two kinds that work together.
00:30:02.559 --> 00:30:10.079
One is hostile, resentment toward women who seem to be taking power that's supposed to belong to men.
00:30:10.079 --> 00:30:12.480
The other sounds sweet.
00:30:12.480 --> 00:30:20.640
It says women are pure and nurturing and should be cherished and protected, and it puts a woman on a pedestal.
00:30:20.640 --> 00:30:29.359
The pedestal rewards women who stay in their assigned place, and the hostility punishes women who don't.
00:30:29.359 --> 00:30:32.160
The label follows the same pattern.
00:30:32.160 --> 00:30:35.359
The saint and the good mother are the reward.
00:30:35.359 --> 00:30:38.720
The witch and the slut are the punishment.
00:30:38.720 --> 00:30:44.160
And there's a third punishment for a woman who leaves a silence behind.
00:30:44.160 --> 00:30:55.599
When a woman dies without explaining herself, the easiest story is that she must have been too fragile to cope, lovesick, unstable, or heartbroken.
00:30:55.599 --> 00:30:57.440
That's the madwoman.
00:30:57.440 --> 00:31:01.119
And it's the label that got pinned on Dorothy Bradford.
00:31:01.119 --> 00:31:04.240
Which brings us back to the Headstone in Burrowville.
00:31:04.240 --> 00:31:13.759
In part two of our Witch episode, you heard about Albert Bandura's experiment, where college students were allowed to punish another group with electric shocks.
00:31:13.759 --> 00:31:19.440
The students who overheard the group described as animals shocked them harder.
00:31:19.440 --> 00:31:25.759
They also came up with more excuses, like they deserve it, or it's their own fault.
00:31:25.759 --> 00:31:30.720
And the more excuses a student came up with, the harder they punished.
00:31:30.720 --> 00:31:39.119
And when the other group was described as perceptive and understanding, the punishment stayed low no matter what.
00:31:39.119 --> 00:31:45.440
The label didn't just make people seem less human, it gave the punishers an excuse.
00:31:45.440 --> 00:31:53.839
A farm wife who buried three babies and saved her money for her grandson's schooling is not someone anybody takes a rock to.
00:31:53.839 --> 00:31:58.720
A witch who killed a baby for the devil is a different story.
00:31:58.720 --> 00:32:01.920
For some people, that isn't just a grave anymore.
00:32:01.920 --> 00:32:06.799
The label already supplied the excuse that she was evil and deserved it.
00:32:06.799 --> 00:32:09.519
And the antidote was in the same experiment.
00:32:09.519 --> 00:32:14.480
The people who'd been described as human got the lowest punishment of all.
00:32:14.480 --> 00:32:20.799
Which brings us back to episode one again, which was titled, Are Women Human?
00:32:20.799 --> 00:32:25.039
Now let's return to the questions I posed at the beginning of this episode.
00:32:25.039 --> 00:32:28.559
So who gets to tell a woman's story after she dies?
00:32:28.559 --> 00:32:31.039
The answer is whoever outlives her.
00:32:31.039 --> 00:32:41.759
No court will hear her, so the story belongs to a successor with a chisel, enemies with pens, a husband who meant well, or a family with a ghost story.
00:32:41.759 --> 00:32:46.079
Sometimes they invent a label out of nothing, like the witch in Burleville.
00:32:46.079 --> 00:32:49.759
Sometimes they borrow it from another woman, like the cake line.
00:32:49.759 --> 00:32:53.119
Sometimes they rewrite her death, like the horse.
00:32:53.119 --> 00:32:56.319
Sometimes they fill her silence with a broken heart.
00:32:56.319 --> 00:33:03.440
And sometimes the label grows with each retelling, like Tichubas, until nobody remembers the original.
00:33:03.440 --> 00:33:06.480
Why do those stories outlive the truth?
00:33:06.480 --> 00:33:11.680
Because every retelling bends a story toward what people already expect.
00:33:11.680 --> 00:33:17.759
Because hearing something again makes it feel true, even to people who know better.
00:33:17.759 --> 00:33:25.519
And because a correction on its own leaves a hole, and people would rather keep the myth than have no explanation at all.
00:33:25.519 --> 00:33:32.240
And I think right there is an explanation of how Fox News got so successful.
00:33:32.240 --> 00:33:37.279
And the last question: why do they so often turn her into a witch or a slut?
00:33:37.279 --> 00:33:43.119
Because a woman who reaches for power stirs up disgust in a way a man doesn't.
00:33:43.119 --> 00:33:47.279
Because those labels punish women who leave their assigned place.
00:33:47.279 --> 00:33:55.759
And because once the label is attached, it gives people permission to do whatever they want to her, even to her gravestone.
00:33:55.759 --> 00:33:59.519
Voltaire said we owe the dead only the truth.
00:33:59.519 --> 00:34:02.480
But no one is holding us accountable.
00:34:02.480 --> 00:34:10.000
So the next time you hear a woman from history called a witch or a slut, ask who benefits from that story.
00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:12.079
Then tell her real one.
00:34:12.079 --> 00:34:17.840
If you enjoyed this episode, please follow wherever you listen and leave a rating or review.
00:34:17.840 --> 00:34:19.679
This will help me keep it going.
00:34:19.679 --> 00:34:22.880
You can also support us directly on Buy Me a Coffee.
00:34:22.880 --> 00:34:25.679
The link is in the show notes along with my sources.
00:34:25.679 --> 00:34:30.000
And you can find us on Instagram at the.wbs.pod.
00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:37.760
That's the t-e.wbs.pod pod, where I post accompanying images to each episode.
00:34:37.760 --> 00:34:40.960
Now I'm going to leave you with Hatshepsuit.
00:34:40.960 --> 00:34:51.360
She knew people would talk about her long after she was gone, so she had a message carved on one of her obelisks at Karnak for whoever came later.
00:34:51.360 --> 00:34:56.480
After she died, someone tried to make sure she'd never be part of that conversation.
00:34:56.480 --> 00:35:01.920
They cut her name out of the walls, smashed her statues, and dumped the pieces in a pit.
00:35:01.920 --> 00:35:05.599
For more than 3,000 years it mostly worked.
00:35:05.599 --> 00:35:08.000
But the obelisk survived.
00:35:08.000 --> 00:35:11.599
It's still standing with her words still on it.
00:35:11.599 --> 00:35:18.239
And when people finally went back and read what she'd left, she got the last word after all.
00:35:18.239 --> 00:35:22.159
Quote, now my heart turns this way and that.
00:35:22.159 --> 00:35:30.639
And I think what the people will say, those who see my monuments in after years and shall speak of what I have done.
00:35:30.639 --> 00:35:36.400
That's us, we're the people who saw her monument three and a half thousand years later.
00:35:36.400 --> 00:35:43.360
And we get to choose whether we repeat what someone else said about her or read what she left us.
00:35:43.360 --> 00:35:46.480
This has been Witches, Bitches, and Sluts.
00:35:46.480 --> 00:35:47.360
Thanks for listening.
00:35:47.360 --> 00:35:51.920
I'm Xtina Rose, and I'll see you next week for Catherine the Great.